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Greg Lukianoff
The Eternally Radical Idea, Substack
Excerpt: 1. The situation on campus for free speech has been bad for a long time.
If you’re tired of hearing it, believe me, I’m tired of saying it — but it needs to be said, over and over, until people finally get it and start doing something to fix it.
I’ve been fighting for free speech on campus since I started at FIRE back in 2001. Indeed, FIRE was founded in response to a growing free speech crisis in higher education, and that was in 1999! The situation was worse than I thought back when I started, and it has reached crisis level over the past decade.
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I recently listened to Ross Douthat’s interview with the philosopher Jennifer Frey. She is a serious thinker and an unusually courageous academic entrepreneur. What she built at the University of Tulsa before it was dismantled is exactly the sort of thing more universities should be attempting. Yet almost every argument she offered for the humanities is, I think, completely unpersuasive to anyone not already on our side of the table.
This report presents findings from a national survey of 1,959 law school faculty at 192 American Bar Association (ABA) approved law schools in the United States, conducted by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). As one of the largest surveys of law faculty on free expression and professional norms, the data reveal a profession that strongly endorses free speech principles while struggling to live them out in practice.
I just returned from the University of Wyoming, where I debated the President of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) Todd Wolfson over the need for colleges and universities to maintain institutional neutrality. The debate was organized by the Steamboat Institute and was live-streamed.
The formal question presented for debate was: “Is institutional neutrality necessary to preserve the university as a forum for open inquiry rather than an actor in political disputes?” I spoke in favor of institutional neutrality while Wolfson argued against it as a necessary component to higher education.
